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Stripe cofounder here. It's a very fair question.

> I must admit to being somewhat uncomfortable that Stripe seems to be spreading themselves out into areas outside their core business

The vast majority of Stripe employees (and there are now more than 1,000) work on our core functionality today. But we see our core business as building tools and infrastructure that help grow the online economy. ("Increase the GDP of the internet.") When we think about that problem, we see that one of the main limits on Stripe's growth is the number of successful startups in the world. If we can cheaply help increase that number, it makes a lot of business sense for us to do so. (And, hopefully, doing so will create a ton of spillover value for others as well.)

As we grow, we have to get good at walking and chewing gum -- just as Google or Amazon have. However, while we go and tackle other problems, our aim is not only to continue to improve our core payments infrastructure, but do deliver improvements at an accelerating rate.

That's a reasonable point, however I'm not entirely sure the initial core business of Stripe was that. Was there a point where the core business broadened?

I think we first used “increase the GDP of the internet” in early 2012, a few months after Stripe launched.

Very nice! All the best with it all :)

This is what I like about HN. Feels like a small community where cofounders stepping in to guage feedback.

> we see that one of the main limits on Stripe's growth is the number of successful startups in the world. [...] If we can cheaply help increase that number, it makes a lot of business sense for us to do so.

This approach lends itself to spending on many cheap things which, e.g. in this case, might not even have quantifiable benefits.

I'll extend OP's curiosity and wonder how the team behind Stripe press plans on measuring the success of their initiative, and what milestone hits/misses are needed to determine the success or failure state of the project.

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Separately, my background includes vendor risk assessments. This is the kind of thing that makes me question long term investment in a platform. It's admittedly a lower risk than many technical findings, but it's not something to discount when evaluating the use of a startup for critical infrastructure (payment). Knowing Stripe's size, the various risks that PCI participants have to account for (and that's just PCI DSS specifically), and the trouble many larger organizations and startups have in meeting those obligations also makes me that much more likely to strictly score Stripe on the next vendor risk assessment when I see spend of this sort on ancillary/non-critical measures.

I'm sharing how I think because I'd be surprised if others in my field didn't think the same way.

Stripe is a huge company now though. Big companies waste money on all sorts of garbage with little ill effect.

One thousand is nowhere near huge.

From one vendor assessor to another: that is an odd hill to die on in your report, and it’s indistinguishable to Stripe from the general preference in payments for established companies. I would like to see the risk model that measurably connects small marketing expenses to poor data handling.

On a similar note, I've seen one large client's PCI compliance team tell us that we couldn't use Stripe for their integration, primarily because it's seen as a payment processor for startups and not for the "enterprise." It didn't help that Stripe doesn't give out Merchant IDs. Additional risks have been that Stripe has made breaking changes without an api version update and the number of data issues/edge cases we've run into with automatic reconciliation reports.

What perception of market segment have to do with PCI compliance?

Not much, but the assessors are human and often take into account subjective factors like that when making their determination. Or threaten to, which is as good as making it a part of their checklist. That’s here in Australia, anyway, about 5 years ago, nothing to do with stripe but they definitely cared about what our processors reputation looked like

Piggybacking off of top comment to send some UX feedback.

The content blocks that scroll left to right lack signifiers and weren't intuitive for me to scroll them left to right.

I would say having some low opacity arrows (or something similar) would help.

I like this perspective. Being seen as genuine thought leaders (as opposed to all the posers out there) is good for the brand.

Running a small press is a pretty cost-efficient way of doing this. To me, it's more like Intel's days of sponsoring high-school science fairs. It's low-key, long-horizon marketing that doesn't instantly lend itself to ROI calculations, but that can be a boon in a lot of ways both obvious and oblique.

Nice vision.

Off topic. Why is the Stripe Brazil so slow to start working in Brazil? I believe Brazil has an huge space to growths in online payments, and if it process "boletos" (a Brazilian way to pay stuff) besides credit card will be very helpful.

The first thing I thought when reading the post was “I’d much prefer if they worked in allowing us to settle in reais”.

Starting Stripe Atlas, writing Guides to help entrepreneurs, acquiring IndieHackers, and now launching Stripe Press is a very well thought out growth strategy.

Stripe benefits when every new indie hacker or entrepreneur planning to start their business uses their free resources to learn how to go about doing this. The goal of marketing is to be in the mind space of your potential buyer when they feel the need your product serves. If you use Stripe's free resources to learn about building an online business, you're more likely to pick them to accept payments over Braintree/Paypal, etc.

Also, the easier they make starting a business by providing these free resources, the more smart people will take the leap to launch their startups (or side-projects) thereby expanding their overall market.

Lastly, spending your content marketing resources on evergreen content like this has very high leverage — it's a one-time investment that pays off for a very long time, unlike a blog post about a current trend that goes stale quickly.

Goes without saying, but the more businesses Stripe gets using their core product, the better the core product itself gets by amortizing development costs over a larger user and transaction base.

I would argue that some completely separate (sourced) books in a fancy web-giftshop doesn't constitute a product alternative or range-extension.

It's almost akin to a successful tech company starting an annual conference — you wouldn't lambast them for 'losing product focus' on spending a similar amount of productivity (as a book line) in a non-tech-stack branch, would you?

Now, if they doubled-down on Stripe Press to the detriment of Stripe the service, then they would indeed be making a silly mistake. :)

Eh. A non-Stripe-employee wrote a book, and Stripe just funded the printing and threw their logo on it. This isn't meant to be a source of revenue, and other than money I doubt many Stripe resources are going toward it. I wouldn't worry.

It's actually 4 books listed on that page.

As far as I can tell Stripe is very much aware that they are a one product company, and all this is just part of their larger content marketing and "become popular in the industry" strategy.

Yeah, this seems like a very indulgent project. It seems more of a labor of love for those who worked on it than something that moves the business forward. It's the same feeling I get when I look at the Airbnb service fee and get irritated... knowing that they have a very expensive office.

This is only valid if every new employee can contribute to core payments. Scaling laws indicate only a small number of employees can work on one products; additional employee resources might be a net negative.

It may be useful to think of a product/project as a bucket that gets filled via a Zeno's paradox, with possibly negative contributions. At a reasonably small scale (few hundred employees), it may be better to explore new buckets than to add another fractional (and potentially negative, independent of employee quality) unit to core skills.

>End of the day - every employee who is distracted by looking after the assets & numbers for these side projects is an employee who is not focused on their core payments system.

YouTube and Gmail exist, yet Google Search is faster than ever.

The chapter you're referring to is called "The Law of Line Extension". The authors call out Microsoft specifically for attempting to expand their operating system business into office software. As we now know, MS did very well by developing its own office software. The most striking counterexample is in the tech space!

In terms of 'distraction from core business', this is in the same category as having logo'ed schwag to hand out at industry gatherings. It just looks cooler and you normally don't announce the formation of 'Stripe Extruded Plastics'. But it's not like Stripe is turning into an actual publisher.

Cisco's purchase of flip cameras (every executive had a smartphone in their pocket that would render that purchase pointless) and their consumer video conferencing efforts are good examples of going beyond a companies core competency and falling face first.

Having said that neither effort was big enough to really hit them hard in my example. If you're big enough you can fail a lot in smaller efforts.

Come on. Stripe has ~1,000 employees. Stripe Press is probably run by 0.5 employees at most. Is this really a big distraction?

I would agree with you in general, but I don't think your critique fairly applies to Stripe Press, while other things - such as the amazing Stripe Atlas - are very much a great integration/complement of Stripe's core product.